Situation awareness displays, such as helmet-mounted displays, are rapidly becoming required elements of several existing and future mobile platforms and programs. Conformal views of digital terrain data provide a significant increase in almost any situation awareness application. Although several 3D terrain rendering products are available today, they require high-performance rendering hardware not available for flight-worthy applications.
Providing 3D terrain displays involves not only the rendering algorithms, but also involves managing and moving large amounts of data between storage media and rendering processor memory. Mission requirements typically drive the need for removable storage media, and flight-worthy hardware typically requires this to be solid-state storage. Operational requirements drive the need for multiple simultaneous views of similar or differing geographical areas, as well as overlaying terrain with 2D and 3D graphical symbols depicting pathways, obstacles, threats, flight data, etc.
However, the pre-existing low-performance embedded hardware platforms, i.e. older technology hardware currently installed on most mobile platforms, are not capable of providing such 3D terrain displays. Generally, to provide such realtime conformal terrain graphics to fast moving helmet mounted displays requires managing several gigabytes of data and updating the display approximately 30-60 times per second. The known pre-existing embedded hardware is not capable of processing such large volumes of data at speeds necessary to provide real-time 3D terrain rendering for fast-moving helmet mounted displays.